The End Of All Things
by Mir Queen
Summary: Alice and Jasper have a long overdue discussion of Jasper's choice to remain distant from Alice. Companion piece to 'For A Reason: Inauguration', Chapter 50. (Must have read that first).


Disclaimer: I do not own nor make profit off of _Twilight_. It belongs to Stephenie Meyer and Summit Entertainment, etc.

A/N: This one-shot is my first companion piece to _For A Reason: Inauguration_. You must have read that story to understand this one.

 **Notes:**  
When I planned for Alice and Jasper's discussion/reconciliation in Chapter 50 of _FAR: Inauguration_ , I knew Mireille and the Cullens wouldn't be present for it. Not because they don't trust her or their family, but because it's simply a very personal circumstanace they need to talk through in order to move forward in their relationship at this point. As Edward and Mireille both said, it's up to Alice and Jasper now.

Also, practically every song by Alex & Sierra seems to have connotations for Alice and Jasper, especially in this particular situation, so I definitely recommend giving them a listen. :)

 **Song Inspirations:** _  
Bumper Cars_ by Alex & Sierra _  
Million Reasons_ by Lady Gaga

* * *

 **The End Of All Things**

* * *

From the tops of the trees fell distant beams of pale yellow light echoing through a swell of birch, dogwood, and pine. Golden flutters speckled and sprung leaf to green leaf, vein to yellow vein, in the soft breeze of early afternoon. Upon the gray, dry soil two pairs of simple black-shoed feet stood detached over eons of time and memory.

Tall and fair as the glory of honey dawdling in summer air and sunshine, a once virtuous man stood rigid beneath the weight of self condemnation.

Set apart so fair yet unseasonably weak, a woman drooped heavy as a florid rose wilting in a drought of desert sand.

Shameless words entered fiercely into combat with diffident silence. All fair in love and war.

Ephemeral wisdom spoke its tender yearnings over the battle line. Nothing burned if nothing built.

"We can't go on like this," Alice dared to break the stillness, voice returned to the deadness of before.

Silence stretched further still between tidy rows of emotion waiting to burst into brazen chaos.

"How else do we _go_ on?" Jasper muttered.

Alice turned immediately to face the man she had waited thirty years to meet, numbness evaporating in the face of sharp anger.

"Fine," she said, sharp as a tack. "That's a sensible question, after all. How else _do_ we go on, when all you want is to endlessly shame yourself?"

Jasper now effused silence instead, unable to reply.

Frustrated at last, Alice finally burst, "I can't _take_ this anymore! Don't you understand that? I can't live like this! It's torture!"

"Isn't that proof enough of why I chose this?" Jasper sighed mutedly, suddenly exhausted as he turned away from the small woman he had married fifty-four years earlier.

"Proof of the choice you made _then_ doesn't explain why you would keep choosing it _now_."

Jasper sighed more roughly and turned farther from those searching eyes and the abominable painting Mireille had left behind.

"I don't understand," Alice whispered, voice agonized to such an extreme that by all rights tears should have been streaming down her face had she the ability to emit them. "I just don't understand how you can go on letting me feel like this! I could never let you feel the same!"

Beyond herself with desperate chaos, Alice dragged slender fingers through her ragged spikes of hair and threw her small but virtually unbreakable body to the ground. Arms swept around her knees as she had done for weeks now.

"Well you don't let me feel _anything_ of yourself, apparently, do you?" Jasper lashed out unthinkingly, tremors of a growl waiting in his throat.

Alice hissed through clenched teeth, closing her eyes and clenching those thin arms tighter about her legs. Immense effort appeared to draw lines of strain in her stone brow.

"And there you're doing it again," Jasper called her out with a coldness he'd never thought he could feel towards little Alice from Biloxi, still refusing to face her tiny form.

"No, that wasn't for you, that was for _me_!" Alice snapped vividly and rapidly, offering vicious eyes to match Jasper's stinging gaze. "If I had lashed out with what you just made me feel, I'd never be able to forgive myself for it!"

"How is that any different from what I'm feeling?" Jasper demanded, galled to a fault.

"It's different because I wouldn't push you out of my life for it!" Alice cried out, infuriated as she shoved herself back to her feet in a blur of pure black and pasty white. "I could never push you away from me like this!"

With a sudden scathing laugh, Alice added darkly, "But what am I saying? I don't have to push. You already took that upon yourself without giving a damn what I wanted or needed!"

"You sure as hell didn't need or want me to keep reminding us both what I put you through!" Jasper at last let loose his growl, burgeoning deep in the pit of his stomach straight up to his lips.

"What you're _still_ putting me through!" Alice rage shrilly at the man she had been so enamored with the last eighty-odd years. The man she'd thought knew her inside and out, and she him.

To that Jasper had no reply, no rejoinder to urge on the fury and mad pain.

"I once thought," Alice pressed onward painfully, "that my greatest fear was seeing you killed. The Volturi, James, Maria, even the wolves… But now… I fear most the pain caused by the person who means the most to me."

Jasper could find no words, merely shaking his head on and on.

"I can't stomach this!" Alice quietly cried out, hope a mere spindle of imagination upon the yawning spread of time she could see etched out in the stars. "I won't torment myself that way!"

Staring wide-eyed, empty, bewildered, Alice saw her future expanding out in front of her – an endless abyss of yearning for the touch she had grown to cherish, the companionship she never knew was missing, the voice that had so often soothed her soul of pain. Giddy, lovestruck fool forever reaching for what she couldn't touch.

"I could never live like you want me to…" Alice expelled in a troubled breath swelling in the moment until it burst with one final conclusion, "I _won't_ live that way."

Jasper snorted mockingly, though deep in his chest he felt the burning pain of speaking so harshly to his tiny mate. "How do you expect to change my choice?"

"Mir was wrong, you know," Alice whispered without answering the cold question, voice and onyx orbs so close to the phenomena of human tears that her black eyes burned with the phantom sensation.

Hardly concerned why their virtual sister had been wrong, Jasper sighed but allowed his mate to emit her emotional considerations without interruption. He could offer that, at least.

"That painting isn't our future," Alice now pressed, a surge of calm overcoming her for Jasper to feel all too clearly.

The odd emotion, caught up in the midst of such damaging pain and loss, matched nothing of the raging hurt Jasper could so clearly feel. Powerful hurt he had been feeling already for weeks on end – the very emotion that kept him separate from his wife. Calm didn't match anything of what he knew Alice was experiencing.

Whatever withholding Alice had done in their years together, the dispute between them now begat no hiding and no secrecy of feeling. The tiny woman Jasper had long loved made no bones about her emotions now.

"I couldn't understand Edward in _New Moon_ ," Alice kept talking, almost entirely ignoring the growing concern and confusion of the man beside her as they circled around each other and the dimming clearing. "I was angry with him… Even after you and Carlisle tried your best to explain, I didn't understand why my brother would end his life – not with so many people who loved him and would grieve his loss."

Alarm spread in Jasper's ludicrously overwhelmed thoughts. It was incomprehensible to imagine what Alice could possibly be leading up to. He refused to believe it. Not her.

"Now I know Edward's reason," Alice whispered, calm turning to frenzied anticipation buried under mounds of frozen disenchantment. "I finally understand… If you weren't here in my life and at my side, I would never want anything to do with living. I want nothing without you in it."

"You can't be serious," Jasper uttered, devoid of all color and life. "This can't be what you mean."

"I can't bear the thought of living alone again," Alice wound down to the bare threads of her understanding, fire turning to dying embers as her voice retreated to no more than a bleak murmur. "I spent almost thirty years waiting for you… I could have found our elusive family. I could have followed them until you were ready to come home… but you were all I could see."

Alice's eyes closed in twisted pain too deep to be comprehended by a mere glance, hands clutching and clasping at the malnourished bones her spiteful human life had left her with.

"I couldn't…" she tried to speak further, fighting for words to explain the choice she would have stopped her brother from making.

Giving up on whatever half-conceived notions she had considered, Alice concluded in near silence, "…You're my life... and I'll never stop loving you. I'm so sorry."

As close to tears as any vampire could be with such nonexistent capability, lips held steel taut and eyes bitterly clenched to slits, Alice inhaled with trembling lips, taking in the scent and sight she wanted to remain locked in her heart at the end of all things.

"You know I can't let that happen," Jasper whispered, terrified not only for his cruel control but for the absolute certainty in Alice's lifeless eyes. Flinching at the mere suggestion of lifelessness, Jasper refused to allow such an atrocity.

"If I were ever capable of hating you," Alice's horrified whisper echoed more powerfully around them than any shout, "I would hate you now."

Flinching violently in the face of such genuine truth, Jasper couldn't hold his mate's gaze.

"Mir was right about my future after all," Alice breathed tragically shallow, panicking ever so gradually at the trap in which she found herself. "Not because I choose it, but because you're choosing it for me."

"I can't let you just walk to your death," Jasper countered, terrorized over and over by the very idea that death could take the vibrant little vagabond who once offered her hand to him without fear.

Daring himself to look at her now, seeing both faces side-by-side in his head, Jasper cringed away from the horrendous changes. A cute little bob made of tiny strands of black, set atop this thin little body robed in grace and elegance… Now the shambles of raven spikes Mireille took such care to comb and style sat in chaos over the plain veil of black mourning. Molten eyes of gold had once stared at Jasper in fascination, longing, attraction, relief…

Jasper remembered sharing a gaze with those golden pools of warmth, his own ebony eyes stained with memories of crimson death. Yet she had felt no fear. Alice had stretched out her hand and those eyes sparkled at him with secrets he longed to divine, him and him alone taking part in her mysterious little world.

"You would… force me to feel this pain, every day of my life?" Alice begged the question with little curiosity, voice catching on a sob. She knew his answer already. No words could cross Jasper's lips, for Alice didn't wait on a reply. "You would make me spend every day wishing in vain I could touch your hand, see your face, hear your voice, lay beside you… You would always be there, a ghost hiding in my mind, torturing me while you stay so close yet force me so far away. You're my world… my _home_ … If you're not with me, I'm nothing but a hollow shell."

Every tremulous word echoed the unnerving surety and unfathomable heartbreak Alice had been unable to process or even to acknowledge since Jasper walked away from her. Eyes of gleaming gold had turned to black chasms; no fascination tended the void, no longing or attraction for the body she had loved every day for the last five decades filled her senses. There was no relief to stem the aching that came before.

Against the green and golden trees, branches dipping gently with developing leaves and spring florets, and a luminous river hastening beyond vision into the west, Alice's lone figure collapsed onto the stone Jasper had cracked as surely as her heart with thin arms swept around her knees and chaotic black spikes bowed low over top of them. Once an oracle of hope in the darkest of futures, Alice dressed in black from head to toe, her tiny form now racked with sobbing grief and emptiness and her lovely elfin face turned away from Jasper's view.

Eyes cast upon that desolate figure, sobs turned to heart-wrenching keening as Alice's body trembled with the force of her agony, Jasper despised everything about his selfish, possessive, unholy soul.

No amount of rationalization, no level of justification, not a single fear of guilt of regret, could ever compare to that sight – the sight of Mireille's dread painting coming to life before Jasper's very eyes. Yet not even that unspeakable image could compete with the most devastating of all expectations…

Awash in the sickness of Jasper's dark essence, Alice had truly lost almost all sensation of hope.

Hope. The very thing little Alice had forged in Jasper's weary, abused heart solely by offering him a glimpse of her mercurial golden reverie.

So sure had Jasper been of his own monstrous state that he failed to envision the consequences of stealing away hope from the hopeful, faith from the faithful. Was this wraith even _his_ Alice – though he had no right to claim her for himself? Was this Alice Cullen? Or was this the face of Mary Alice Brandon, whom Mireille had known intimately without ever meeting her in the flesh?

Shivering overpowered Jasper at the concept of a beautiful, brave young woman locked away by her murderous father, physically tortured merely for her innate brilliance, all dignity stolen by cruel hands and careless regimen. A beautiful mind curled away from the world, locked away from all but her unseen sight.

Jasper choked on his own inequity.

How could he have become so cruel as to emulate every one of those torments in his beloved mate? His vibrant wife, the better half of his whole world, destroyed by the one she waited so long to love.

Tall and fair as the glory of honey dawdling in summer air and sunshine, Jasper fell to his knees under the rigid weight of self condemnation.

Set apart so fair yet unseasonably weak, Alice slowly lifted her heavy head as a flower blossoming in the adversity of the desert sand.

A once virtuous man released himself to the auspice of a florid rose he had all but wilted in the drought of his heart.

"Alice."

A lonely, diffident word surrendered unto shameless silence. All fair in love and war.

Alice said nothing, but reached out with yearning fingers to touch the face of the one she loved. In silent disbelief, onyx eyes pooled with reluctant hope.

Timeless wisdom spoke its tender consolation over no man's land. Nothing built if nothing burned.

From the tops of the trees fell distant beams of pale white light echoing through a swell of birch, dogwood, and pine. Silver flutters spotted and danced leaf to shadowed leaf, vein to shaded vein, in the stillness of late evening. Upon the dark, moist soil two pairs of simple black-shoed feet stood united over eons of time and memory.

* * *

A/N: Review replies for this story will be posted on Chapter 51 of _For A Reason: Inauguration_. Thank you for reading!


End file.
